Urban vitality, intricately connected to urban morphology, has long been a cornerstone of urban planning and design. The accelerated pace of urbanization has created abundant living and working spaces, but it has also brought about a series of issues such as traffic congestion, environmental pollution, insufficient public spaces, and uneven urban development, leading to a decline in urban vitality. The spatial distribution patterns of urban vitality and their influencing factors are diverse and vary across different cities, necessitating a multidimensional exploration of the relationship between urban vitality and the built environment. Utilizing the central urban area of Beijing as a case study, this research leverages multi-source urban spatial data to delineate the spatial characteristics of social, economic, cultural, and comprehensive vitality. Furthermore, a comprehensive set of built-environment indicators is developed across five dimensions to analyze their correlation with urban vitality. The results indicate: (1) There is a significant spatial clustering of various vitality types in Beijing, with a pronounced correlation between high-density population aggregation and vigorous economic activities. (2) Subdistricts exhibiting high social vitality display an “n”-shaped distribution around the Second Ring Road. In contrast, those with high economic vitality are concentrated along Chang’an Street and various district commercial centers. High cultural vitality subdistricts are distributed in a northwest–southeast trajectory from the Fourth Ring Road to the Second Ring Road, and subdistricts with high comprehensive vitality exhibit a concentric distribution radiating outwards from the center. (3) Social vitality is most closely related to comprehensive vitality, and the various vitality types in Beijing’s central urban area develop relatively evenly. (4) The built environment significantly affects all types of urban vitality. Factors such as floor area ratio, POI density, POI mixing degree, and intersection density are fundamental to enhancing urban vitality, whereas the greening rate somewhat inhibits it. (5) Future spatial planning should utilize the radiating effect of high-vitality subdistricts to optimize population distribution, enhance POI mixing, increase metro station density, and strengthen critical urban structures for synergistic economic and cultural development. This study provides a foundation and promotion strategies for optimizing the layout and enhancing vitality at the subdistrict scale within Beijing’s central urban area.

Promoting sustainable urban development is crucial in light of upcoming environmental change and population expansion. Urban forests play a key role in transporting ecosystem services to urban areas. They not only offer a crucial biological setting for preserving urban biodiversity, but they also give recreation dwellers access to a variety of urban opportunities and ensure their spiritual and cultural needs are met. Maintaining urban biodiversity and offering recreation services have trade-offs and synergies, and both were highly connected with the size of an urban forest patch. Six districts in Beijing’s central urban area were chosen for this study to serve as the research objective. First, the MSPA model was employed to conduct a thorough scientific analysis of the pattern and distribution characteristics of urban forests in Beijing’s central urban area. Second, the recreation services were quantified by merging many sources of big data, the urban forest biodiversity preservation services were assessed using the InVEST model, and the spatial heterogeneity of the two services was examined. In conclusion, the coupling coordination degree model was utilized to calculate the crucial threshold interval between urban biodiversity service and recreation service for urban forest patch area. The findings indicated that the ideal urban forest patch scale for achieving the synergy of the two types of services was an area between 0.5 and 1 hectare. The outcomes can serve as a scientific foundation for urban forest planning and management in the future, assist in realizing the synergistic growth of the two services, as well as support the improvement of ecosystem services and the ecological welfare of people.